2024-W08 EOW Report

Highlights This Week

• This was a rough week. Someone I thought I knew turned out to be someone completely different. It was a change kept hidden over the last two years and I spent a lot of time talking to people in their circle figuring this out. The emotional drain carried forward the entire week. On top of this, all week, my wife has been concerned with our financial projections this year. Just a lot of heavy adult things this week.
• On Saturday despite being a relatively free day after my bi-monthly check-in with Garage Fiction, I decided I needed to keep “clearing the decks”. For several months now, there have been six stacks of books on the Renaissance and Reformation on my desk in my home office, along with a wargame, Arquebus: Men of Iron Volume IV (2017), laid out underneath it all. I was not really using my home office because of this huge mess. So I spent most of Saturday reorganizing my bookshelves. I crammed fiction into the lower three on one Billy, shifted all RPG material into the other Billy behind the glass doors, brought all Shakespeare and epic poetry out into the open, found more RPGs to sell, boxed up several wargames for the crawlspace, and finally, transferred all the 16^th C. books to their own dedicated two shelves. My desk is completely clear again.
• Garage Fiction got more personal this month and it was good that we did that. I feel like despite knowing these people for almost a decade now, we still don’t really know each other. Which is thematically aligned with the first bullet point from this week.

Project Status Dashboard

The following are ongoing fiction writing projects broken down to what stage they’re in. Legend in footnote¹.

Friday from week before we had a MRK SSC class on Heist Structure. I mentioned that I had a sketch idea where a group of friends want to break up a couple in their friend group and it would be shot like a heist. Everyone loved it. So on Sunday, I sketched out what that would be like and ended up outlining something. That’s prj: YOKO.

On Monday night, thumbnails sketches were due. I ended up submitting the three I did for prj: MINOS and one for YOKO. Went down a rabbit hole on YouTube briefly looking at how visual artists use thumbnails as I had mentioned last week.

Made a couple attempts to draft on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday night, and just couldn’t get MINOs going. Getting closer though. What stopped me on Wednesday was realizing I was worldbuilding and wasting time figuring out details when what was missing was TENSION. So went down a rabbithole of figuring out the Levels of Tension. Once I had that down, I had to outline everything again with new scenes, and because it was a short, I shifted the timeline of certain relationships further along. Friday night, I did that.

Daily Tracking

This will be the future space for tracking either daily time spent, or daily word count.

EOW Time Tracking

The following is based on logged productive hours using Timeular. Parameters and definitions in footnote².

In Summary:

• F = 19% (stable from last week, would still prefer higher numbers)
• X = 19% (dramatic decrease, see bullet point 1)
• C = 54% (dramatic increase, but prolly b/c of point 1 and lack of journaling)
• P = 9% (meeting with SG and JK this week)

Four Thousand Weeks

Yeah, a lot of “adulting” this week in terms of things happening in my circle. Everything was just so heavy, urgent, and shocking. AM came in to the office on Friday to be a friend. I guess that’s why I needed to clear the decks on Saturday after this week.

Book Reading

• Finished, no, burned through at a breakneck pace of 2.3X, Well of Ascension (2007). Was very much entertained. Live commentary here
• GMT Games charged me for France ‘40 (2013) this past week. I could’ve stopped it, like I could’ve stopped all the Simonitch ‘XX ZOC-Bond games, but I didn’t. I dunno. I still have some vague hope that in some non-existent future, I’ll sit down and play these games. I figure with the low counters density, the simple ruleset of ZOC-Bonds, and that these maps actually fit on my desk… I dunno. I just dunno. This is someone who just put five wargames into a box and stuck packing tape on it.
• Still reading Pride and Prejudice and Stranger in a Strange Land here and there. But one day before I was almost done Well of Ascension, A Promised Land became available in Libby. So I’m starting that. On one hand, I enjoyed and I am enjoying the two books… but on another, I don’t like being dictated to when I can consume a book or not. I might just treat the books I get via Libby with a more laissez-faire attitude instead of going HAM gamifying it by scheduling when holds come through or not. Everything takes up bandwidth and I just need to keep cutting and cutting. If it doesn’t help me move forward on actually writing fiction, I just need to cut it. Sell it, archive it, delay it, move it, ignore it.

Archive of all EOW reports here